http://edge.org/conversation/richard_daw...on-of-life
EXCERPT: [...] Over the years Dawkins has been among the most frequent (and valued) Edge contributors, and our pages are filled with his elegant writing and brilliant thinking. On a trip to England this month, it occurred to me all of his contributions on Edge had been the result either of his public speaking or his writing. I realized that I had never asked him to sit down for a one-to-one videotaped interview. After making arrangements, we met at noon on Saturday, April 11th, in the Enthoven Room of New College to have an Edge conversation. I am pleased to present the video and the transcript below...
[...] My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there's only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call "life" to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that's it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life. If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication....
[...] My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don't reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that's a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. [...] There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They're both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn't get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it's going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual / replicator dichotomy. They're both units of selection, but in different senses. It's important to understand that they are different senses....
[...] One of the things that I've always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I've been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself....
EXCERPT: [...] Over the years Dawkins has been among the most frequent (and valued) Edge contributors, and our pages are filled with his elegant writing and brilliant thinking. On a trip to England this month, it occurred to me all of his contributions on Edge had been the result either of his public speaking or his writing. I realized that I had never asked him to sit down for a one-to-one videotaped interview. After making arrangements, we met at noon on Saturday, April 11th, in the Enthoven Room of New College to have an Edge conversation. I am pleased to present the video and the transcript below...
[...] My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there's only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call "life" to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that's it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life. If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication....
[...] My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don't reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that's a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. [...] There are two kinds of unit of selection. The difference is a semantic one. They're both units of selection, but one is the replicator, and what it does is get itself copied. So more and more copies of itself go into the world. The other kind of unit is the vehicle. It doesn't get itself copied. What it does is work to copy the replicators which have come down to it through the generations, and which it's going to pass on to future generations. So we have this individual / replicator dichotomy. They're both units of selection, but in different senses. It's important to understand that they are different senses....
[...] One of the things that I've always done is not make a clear separation between books that are aimed at popularizing, books that are aimed at explaining things to other people, and books that explain things to myself, or explain things to my scientific colleagues. I think the separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone. And I have found that the exercise of explaining to other people, which I suppose I've been fairly successful at, is greatly helped by the fact that I first have to explain it to myself....